SEO has come to stay as a strategic marketing channel for business owners, each year it evolves into a more sophisticated discipline. As brands and industries continue to appreciate the importance of SEO, there is little time for you as a marketer to rest on your laurels, you have to refine your skills sets continuously.
This article is dedicated to the best, free, and most effective SEO tools (in increasing order of relevance) any contemporary SEO marketer must have under his belt.
Google Keyword Planner
Formerly known as the AdWords tool, the Google Keyword planner pulls out Google’s monthly query volume estimates for tons of keywords in seconds. This is one SEO tool you shouldn’t underestimate if you are interested in knowing what people search for.
Google Search Console
This SEO tool is analogous to the Bing Webmaster Tool but much richer. Formerly known as the Google Webmaster Tool, the Google Search Console provides data and configuration control for your site in Google, which really is a big deal.
Google Analytics
This tool helps you understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. It delivers data like number of clicks, time spent per session, number of repeated visits and several other statistics. None of the tools mentioned above does a job near as good as this tool.
Webpagetest.org
This free tool will test your site to determine the loading speed. Loading time is one of the variables that affect your Google website ranking, so it’s important to have a fast loading website. Often times it’s helpful to run a baseline test before making changes to your site affecting loading speed, and then test afterwards to determine the change. If you have a WordPress site check out this article on speeding up your WordPress Site.
Google and Bing Search Engines
This is a frequently overlooked SEO tool. Google and Bing search engines are very powerful SEO tools and mastery of the functionality of these tools is an essential tool every marketer must learn. With a search for any word you can examine indexation and duplicate content, check key word ranking, analyze SERP listings and scout for link and outreach prospects. Make sure to use an incognito / private window to see search results that aren’t affected by your search history.
Wayback Machine
This tool is the most complete archive on the web and it lets you see what a website used to look like back in the day. With this tool you can crack client’s cases of missing traffic by checking what was on the site and what wasn’t when the site had better traffic because usually, when the numbers for a site change then something about that site has changed.
Keywordtool.io
This SEO tool is great for generating several keyword ideas related to your seed term, particularly long-tail keywords that wouldn’t show up on the AdWords keyword tool because of their having very low volumes. If you are looking to build a list of potential keywords particularly when you need long-tail keywords then this tool is just what you need. This tool is also very comprehensive as it generates keywords based on the autocomplete feature of Google, YouTube, Bing or App Store Search.
Moz SEO Tools
Moz is a suite of inbound marketing tools responsible for various functions. Top pick from the Moz suite include these useful SEO tools:
Open Site Explorer – This is a backlink analysis tool with metrics on estimating link equity.
Follower wonk – Shows analytics on Twitter
Moz Local – This tool gives data on a company’s local citations and is the first place to go when doing local SEO on a site.
The SERP Overlay – This tool is part of the Mozbar. It displays OSE metrics on each search results.
Honorable mentions listed in no particular order include Screaming Frog, Bing Webmaster Tool, Chrome Developer Tool, Google Trends, GTmetrix and Hootsuite.
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